Restaurants Are Built
Around People.

Our story starts in a hotel lobby in Greenwood, Mississippi. ML Bagwell was delivering newspapers for a Memphis publisher when he overheard two businessmen talking about a struggling SONIC Drive-In and everything going wrong with it. ML wasn’t one to let an opportunity pass — he walked over and offered to buy the drive-in right there. They said no. He asked again. And again. The two men, Chuck Harrison and Ralph Mason, never did sell — but they finally agreed to let ML run it.

Ralph Mason was one of SONIC’s earliest franchisees, and he went on to build one of the most successful real estate and restaurant portfolios in the country. That single conversation tied our family to his for good, and to one of the oldest, largest SONIC franchise operations in the country.

ML ran the business the way he ran everything — as a family affair. His first managers were his son and sons-in-law, and together they built BBWI: Bagwell, Bagwell, Winstead, Irwin. As ML’s grandchildren joined the business to carry the legacy forward, the name evolved again, becoming Southern Partners.

Today, that hotel-lobby conversation has grown into 22 SONIC Drive-Ins we own and operate, plus two more we supervise for another ownership group — 24 restaurants in all, across four states. In 2020, our family took its first step beyond SONIC, bringing Slim Chickens to Mississippi — and in 2025, we sold that business to a new investor who continues to operate and grow it. That freed us to put our full focus back where it started: acquiring and developing more SONIC Drive-Ins, and investing in the people who run them.